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Showing Original Post only (View all)Why American and Britain are Self-Destructing [View all]
<snip>
There are only two societies in the rich world where life is getting shorter, poorer, meaner, and more hopeless fast. Where life expectancies, incomes, and savings are all falling. America and Britain. Where middle classes have imploded, people live hand to mouth, and upward mobility has all but vanished. Where the idea of living a better life is somewhere between a joke and a distant memory. Where entire generations of young people at last count, three, Gen X, Millennials, and Get Z live worse lives than their parents and grandparents. Just two such societies where trust, happiness, and purpose have all imploded catastrophically while depression, rage, anxiety, and suicide are all surging.
America and Britain have entered a vicious cycle, a death spiral. Its a novel and bizarre phenomenon for a modern, rich society, unseen since Weimar Germany. It goes like this. In the 1980s, America began decades of underinvestment in public goods and social systems. It privatized whatever there was to privatize. The idea was that whatever it was healthcare, education, finance the private sector could do it better. The Reagan Revolution was in full effect as a backlash to the advances civil rights made in the 1960s and 1970s, the good white American using choice as a shield to protect themselves from ever having to invest in or mingle with those dirty, filthy subhumans. All that was called neoliberalism. Let markets sort it all out! Translation: let the strong survive, and the weak perish.
<snip>
At the same time, the private sector which was supposed to provide good healthcare, education, retirement, finance, and so on, began to charge the average American more and more for these things, while lowering their quality. After all, corporations are profit-seeking entities: their motivation is money. And so over time, the average American began to pay prices for things that astonished the rest of the world: $50K for childbirth, $200K for an education, and so on. How could they afford the basics of life at ever increasing prices when their incomes had begun to stagnate? They couldnt so they began to go into massive debt (and today, the average American dies in debt.)
<snip>
We are seeing a weird and gruesome new thing in the modern world. Rich countries which become failed states. In a precise and hard sense: they enter death spirals of austerity-poverty which cause a chain reaction self-destruction. That is the story of America and Britains twin collapses. Having let their investment rates fall too low, kicking off a vicious spiral of austerity and poverty leading to more austerity and poverty which left the average person too poor to invest in anyone else, let alone him or herself now no recovery towards a path of progress may be possible. Their future is just more of this, more regress, only harder and faster. Their destiny now well may be written in stone. They are joining nations like Russia and Venezuela in decline and collapse.
<snip>
More: https://eand.co/why-american-and-britain-are-self-destructing-a8693ebb097
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I believe the death of the unions was a major factor in both the U.S. and Britain.
olegramps
Dec 2019
#71
WHat can one say? It is demoralizing as hell to live in a short-sighted and very selfish governed
hlthe2b
Dec 2019
#3
What might be going on is a collapse of monarchism and democracy through corporatocracy's insurgency
ancianita
Dec 2019
#5
Believe that if you want to, but honesty requires a much bigger perspective than this study. And the
ancianita
Dec 2019
#26
Nobody's standing by unless they are DISabled from using reasonable means to rid
ancianita
Dec 2019
#35
It takes time to learn when they're LYING. I said what I said, not what you said I said.
ancianita
Dec 2019
#42
Shame does not build a self to preserve. Shame does not build capacity; it incapacitates.
ancianita
Dec 2019
#43
Not in the legal, public, contractual up front sense of "purchase." Trump hid illegal money
ancianita
Dec 2019
#28
It's interesting that you say "a few filthy rich." We know their names, & relative to billions
ancianita
Dec 2019
#76
and the only reason it works is liberals ignore 1500 coordinated radio stations
certainot
Dec 2019
#32
I agree but WHO has funded the placement of those propaganda broadcasts on 1500 radio stations?
hedda_foil
Dec 2019
#44
i think a lot of the stations are just loudly dominant in their areas, or the only AM
certainot
Dec 2019
#48
sex on the wrong brain explains greed is exacerbated by sending impatient satisfaction-
certainot
Dec 2019
#30
brexit champion nigel farage is a radio talk show host. trump is a dittohead. and putin uses
certainot
Dec 2019
#27
thanks. the kremlin recognized the problem before the dem party and has been using those stations
certainot
Dec 2019
#81
Thank you for initiating one of the best discussions I've seen on DU for some time.
scarletwoman
Dec 2019
#40